Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Progressive Extinction of Freedom of Speech

This item has not yet made the MSM, but give
it time. The bloviating MSM is pretty desperate for news of any kind that will
shoot down Trump, and I’m certain that a determined “reporter” will come up
with ambiguous and verbose parallels between Trump and the dead rhino. Perhaps
the rhino shed his yellow hair?

At the moment, however, the MSM is
gathering steam to make a major impeachment-worthy story over Stormy Daniels’ claim
that over a decade ago (or more) she
hugged Donald Trump in amorous and scandalous collusion. It is supposed
that no American president ever had “relations” with a “loose” woman; one
supposes that JFK was a chaste
Catholic, and that FDR was a pillar of sexual
propriety, as well, and that having such a tête-à-tête proves that a man who so dallied was not
qualified to sit in the Oval Office. Name me a president who never had
sex with any women outside his family circle. Jimmy Carter, perhaps. The MSM is
no doubt hoping that Stormy will help to accomplish what Humpty Dumpty Robert
Mueller failed to do
after a year of “investigating” the existence of a prancing unicorn. The
Mueller investigation, amounting to likely thousands of pages of useless
documents, has the credibility

The subject here is not Trump’s extracurricular
adventures, which I think most Americans care very little about, but rather, freedom
of speech, here and abroad.Germany’s
outlawing freedom of speech concerning the opposition to and criticism of Islam
is by now
old hat.

The MP for the hard-right Alternative for
Germany (AfD) party detected in the force’s multilingual new-year greeting a
bid “to appease the barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men”. The next day her
tweet—and, for 12 hours, her entire account—vanished from Twitter. In the
subsequent political storm Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, came to Ms von
Storch’s defence: “Our authorities are subordinating themselves to imported,
rampaging, groping, punching, stabbing migrant mobs,” she tweeted. That, too,
was promptly deleted.

Germany’s memories of the Gestapo and the
Stasi undergird its commitment to free speech. “There shall be no censorship,”
decrees the constitution. Even marches by Pegida, an Islamophobic and
anti-immigrant movement founded in 2014, receive police protection. But the
country of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust also takes a punitive attitude to
what it deems “hate speech”. Inciting hatred can carry a prison sentence of up
to five years, Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is available only in annotated form, and
it is illegal to single out any part of the population for insult or other
abuse that could “breach the peace”. …

Reconciling these two convictions—for free speech and against hate
speech—is becoming harder, particularly since Angela Merkel’s refugee gambit in
2015. Opening Germany’s borders to some 1.2m mostly Muslim migrants has fuelled
the rise of nativist outfits like the AfD and Pegida. Racist propaganda and
sensationalist reports (some, though not all, fake) of criminal and rapist
immigrants have rippled across social media. In 2016, for example, the number
of criminal investigations into online hate speech in Berlin rose by 50%. A
number of the newcomers from the Middle East and Africa are anti-Semitic.
Confronting such ills without encroaching too much on freedom of expression is
tricky.

The most prominent example of the balancing act is the new Net
Enforcement Law (NetzDG), of which Ms von Storch’s and Ms Weidel’s tweets were
early victims. Inspired by the rise of fake news and a report suggesting that
only a minority of illegal posts on social media were being removed within a
day (and just 1% or so on Twitter), the law cleared the Bundestag last June and
came into force on January 1st. It sets out 20 things defining a comment as
“clearly illegal”, such as incitement to hatred or showing the swastika. Once
posts are flagged by users, a social-media firm has 24 hours—extended to a week
in complex cases—to check and remove those that contravene the rules, or face a
€50m ($60m) fine. In the first week, Facebook’s over 1,000 German moderators
have had to process hundreds of thousands of cases.

What? The British
authorities routinely allow jihad inciters and jihad preachers into the
country, while they ban counter-terror experts and counter-jihadists, and now
they are appealing to the British public, asking them to act as
“counter-terrorism citizens” and help thwart plots and stop the wave of Islamic
extremist attacks hitting the nation.

But what will
happen if British citizens heed this call and start reporting suspicious
activity? Will they be arrested for hate speech and “Islamophobia”?

Britain is
finished as a free nation.

Whose
“suspicious” activity? The racket produced by a coven of Druids making weird
sounds in the neighboring flat? An “Asian” man purchasing half a dozen pressure
cookers, or a bag of drugs in the local chemists’?

Back to Sweden, which has gone over the
totalitarian cliff in Wile
Coyote style and isn’t even visible as it plummets to the hard ground
below. Swedish police will invest little energy in investigating “hate crimes” (such as rape, assaulting
civilians and the police). Special victims of “hate crimes” will be Muslims.
Robert Spencer reports in “Sweden:
Police to focus on combating “hate speech,” quoting a Swedish
publication:

The Police in the South Region will now
focus more on combating and investigating so-called hate crime as “harassment
of an ethnic group.” A special regional group will be formed responsible for
investigating and prosecuting such cases throughout the region, the police have
announced on their website. According to the police, investigations must be
conducted with urgency and special skills.

It is ahead of the forthcoming elections
this autumn that the police in southern Sweden now have to make extra efforts
to fight so-called hatred and crime against democracy.

The police mention crimes as “harassment of
an ethnic group,” but point out that the hate crime designation may apply to
any crime if the intention was to attack someone because of their national
origin, ethnicity, color, belief or sexual orientation. If there is a so-called
hate crime motive, the perpetrator could receive a more severe penalty for the
crime.

Crime
against democracy is described as a crime that threatens someone’s
constitutional right to exercise, for example, the freedom of expression and
religion.

The police in the South region already have
a hate crime group, and it is going to be expanded in the spring to work
throughout the region. It will have a “holistic mission” combating crime
against democracy and hatred.

Pamela Geller: Will never surrender

“Hate speech” and “hate crime” are foggy
enough in terms of precise definitions, being offences based on what the
authorities think a person’s motive
is or was. Flipping the bird at anyone could be construed to be “hate speech” because
someone did not like someone, but took no other action, and the object of the
action may feel offended. It’s the emotion
that is unapproved by the authorities. It is the “failure” of the state or the
political establishment to regulate and determine what a mind can think and
see. After the failure, come stricter controls, in action and in language (political
correctness).

But what is a “crime against democracy”? The
Swedish government is guilty of a “crime against democracy” for welcoming
countless migrants who resist assimilation. Sweden is no longer a “democracy,”
(a term I’ve always had problems with, because democracy means mob rule; in Sweden Muslims engage in mob rule) and
nor are Germany and Britain; the only group whose “freedom of expression” is no
longer opposed or prohibited is that of Muslims. Muslims can demonstrate
noisily in the streets in mosques or on Speakers Corner in London or preach
against the West and be as “hateful” as their lungs can stand, and not be
accused of “hate speech.” Antifa can
violently close down a scheduled speech at a public venue but not be charged
with hate speech or a hate crime; with perhaps of committing a physical
assault, but never deemed as guilty of a hate crime. Antifa and Islam
ideologically have much in common.

An interesting and comprehensive site, Markl Humphrys, details
the consistent alliance between many intellectuals, the MSM, and politicians
with totalitarians in modern times.

In Markl Humphry’s document, one can see how far back totalitarians
have been winning friends, and how much, in academia, the MSM, in education, and
in popular culture (such as Hollywood).

"Illegal hate speech", is broadly defined by the European Commission as
"incitement to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a
member of such a group defined by reference to race, color, religion, descent
or national or ethnic origin."

But even if the “hate speech” doesn’t result in violence, one can still
be charged and arrested for it, in live public or private discussions and in
print, or just banned. The measure of “offence” is an emotional one tacked to “hurt feelings” or the aggression into a “safe
place.” The protected class is largely exempt from the enforcement of hate
speech laws. Its depredations and crimes can be deliberately hidden from the
public.Gatestone has
an interesting column on European censorship.

One commentator noted about German “hate speech” laws noted:

Under
this legislation, if Muslims generated any terror or rape attacks, reporting
and commenting as such would be a punishable crime. Therefore, no reporting,
the general public is kept ignorant and Brussels achieves the goal of ending in
the public's mind the main significant anti-Muslim immigration reasons. Look
ma, no Muslim rapes or terror. Aren't they wonderful and kudos to the EU for
keeping us safe and making the right choice.

Edward Cline, American Novelist

Edward Cline was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1946. After graduating from high school (in which he learned nothing of value) and a stint in the Air Force, he pursued his ambition to become a novelist. His first detective novel, First Prize, was published in 1988 by Mysterious Press/Warner Books, and his first suspense novel, Whisper the Guns, was published in 1992 by The Atlantean Press. First Prize was republished in 2009 by Perfect Crime. The Sparrowhawk series of novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period has garnered critical acclaim (but not yet from the literary establishment) and universal appreciation from the reading public, including parents, teachers, students, scholars, and adult readers who believe that American history has been abandoned or is misrepresented by a government-dominated educational establishment. He is dedicated to Objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason in all matters.